At the “Egalia” preschool, staff avoid using words like “him” or “her” and address the 33 kids as “friends” rather than girls and boys.

From the color and placement of toys to the choice of books, every detail has been carefully planned to make sure the children don’t fall into gender stereotypes.

Egalia doesn’t deny the biological differences between boys and girls — the dolls the children play with are anatomically correct. What matters is that children understand that their biological differences “don’t mean boys and girls have different interests and abilities.”

The taxpayer-funded preschool which opened last year in the liberal Sodermalm district of Stockholm for kids aged 1 to 6 is among the most radical examples of Sweden’s efforts to engineer equality between the sexes from childhood onward. Breaking down gender roles is a core mission in the national curriculum for preschools, underpinned by the theory that even in highly egalitarian-minded Sweden, society gives boys an unfair edge.

Egalia’s methods are controversial; some say they amount to mind control. But director Lotta Rajalin says that there’s a long waiting list for admission to Egalia, and that only one couple has pulled a child out of the school.

Public schools across the country, struggling with cuts in state funding, are shifting costs to students and their parents by imposing or boosting fees for everything from enrolling in honors English to riding the bus.

At high schools in several states, it can cost more than $200 just to walk in the door, thanks to registration fees, technology fees and unspecified “instructional fees.”

Though public schools have long charged for extras such as driver’s education and field trips, many are now asking parents to pay for supplies needed to take core classes—from biology-lab safety goggles to algebra workbooks to the printer ink used to run off grammar exercises in language arts. In some schools, each class comes with a price tag, to be paid at registration. Some schools offer installment plans for payment. Others accept credit cards—for a processing fee.

Nationally, district after district has eliminated or cut enrichment programs for gifted students, help for struggling readers, advanced math and science courses, music, art, foreign languages, drama, sports. Some have tried asking local residents to approve higher taxes, only to be shot down at the polls. So administrators say fees are the only way to stave off even more drastic cuts.

The founding principle of the Journal of Universal Rejection (JofUR) is rejection. Universal rejection. That is to say, all submissions, regardless of quality, will be rejected. Despite that apparent drawback, here are a number of reasons you may choose to submit to the JofUR:

• You can send your manuscript here without suffering waves of anxiety regarding the eventual fate of your submission. You know with 100% certainty that it will not be accepted for publication.
• There are no page-fees.
• You may claim to have submitted to the most prestigious journal (judged by acceptance rate).
• The JofUR is one-of-a-kind. Merely submitting work to it may be considered a badge of honor.
• You retain complete rights to your work, and are free to resubmit to other journals even before our review process is complete.
• Decisions are often (though not always) rendered within hours of submission.

An 11-year-old boy was arrested, fingerprinted and handcuffed by police in Colorado all because of a stick-figure drawing he made in class. Now his parents say they are out thousands of dollars as a result of the arrest, which took place in October and led to the boy being put on probation.

“It was heart wrenching to see my… 11-year-old son walk out my front door in handcuffs,” said the child’s mother in a report Monday on Fox 31 News in Denver.

The boy, identified as “Tim” because the family did not want their names used, suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder and was told by his therapist to draw pictures when he feels himself get upset or agitated.

On that day last year, he drew a picture of himself as a stick figure, using a gun to shoot several other stick figure people, his mother said. Above the figures he wrote, “teachers must die” and “music sucks.”…

You can pretty much guess the rest — but if you want to suffer through it, it’s at the Daily News.

Elmhurst students have long been checked on how long it takes to run a mile or whether they can do a pushup. But another physical fitness assessment tool has some parents fuming — one that aims at finding out whether their kids are too hefty.

A child’s “body mass index,” a computation of body fat based on height and weight, was one of six tests used at Hawthorne Elementary School to determine the physical fitness grade on a student’s progress report.

But that practice ended abruptly Tuesday after about 25 parents met with school officials to express their displeasure with how the BMI data were being used. One mother broke into tears as she described how it affected her fourth-grade daughter.

[Continues at Chicago Tribune]

Each android teacher is equipped with a screen displaying the face of a human avatar, and is controlled remotely by an actual instructor in the Philippines. It’s a way of outsourcing a job (educating children) that one would have thought had to be done in person. The Daily Mail reports:

Pupils often assume their teachers don’t really exist outside the school gates, now robot classroom assistants could make this a reality. Almost 30 egg-shaped robots have started teaching English at primary schools in South Korea.

The 3.3ft high machines have a TV panel that displays a female Caucasian face and can wheel around the classroom while speaking to the students. The robots are also able to read books and dance to music moving their head and arms.

But despite appearances the robots, developed the Korea Institute of Science of Technology, are not autonomous beings. They are actually controlled remotely by English teachers living in the Philippines, who can see and hear the children via a remote control system. Cameras then detect the teachers’ facial expressions and reflect them on the avatar’s face.

‘Well-educated, experienced Filipino teachers are far cheaper than their counterparts elsewhere, including South Korea,’ Sagong Seong-Dae, a senior scientist at KIST.

The robots will teach after-school classes at 21 schools in the south-eastern city of Daegu.

Apart from reading books, the robots use pre-programmed software to sing songs and play alphabet games with the children. Education official Kim Mi-Young, said: ‘The kids seemed to love it since the robots look, well, cute and interesting. But some adults also expressed interest, saying they may feel less nervous talking to robots than a real person.’

She said the robots are still being tested. But officials might consider hiring them full time if scientists upgrade them and make them easier to handle and more affordable. ‘Having robots in the classroom makes the students more active in participating, especially shy ones afraid of speaking out to human teachers,’ she said.

She stressed the robots, which cost £5,600 each, will provide extra support for teachers but not replace them.

Mr Seong-Dae added: ‘They won’t complain about health insurance, sick leave and severance package, or leave in three months for a better-paying job in Japan… all you need is a repair and upgrade every once in a while.’

The European Commission has demanded Britain justifies the widespread and routine fingerprinting of children in schools because of “significant concerns” that the policy breaks EU privacy laws.

The commissioner is also concerned that parents are not allowed legal redress after one man was told he could not challenge the compulsory fingerprinting, without his permission, of his daughter for a “unique pupil number”.

In many schools, when using the canteen or library, children, as young as four, place their thumbs on a scanner and lunch money is deducted from their account or they are registered as borrowing a book.
Research carried out by Dr Emmeline Taylor, at Salford University, found earlier this year that 3,500 schools in the UK – one in seven – are using fingerprint technology.

EU data protection rules, Brussels legislation that overrides British law, requires that the gathering of information such as biometric fingerprints, must be “proportionate” and must allow judicial challenges.

Hank Roberts, a member of the executive of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, welcomed the EU’s intervention.

“I am very pleased the European Commission is taking action. I believe the fingerprinting of children is a totally unnecessary infringement of civil liberties that could have far reaching implications,” he said. “The legal situation must be looked at. This is being done surreptitiously without parents being told.”

The commission has taken up the case of a Scottish father who has battled education authorities for several years because his daughter’s fingerprints were taken without the family’s permission.

Refused permission to take the case to court, the father was told by Information Commissioner’s Office, the British data protection watchdog, that the secondary school did not need to ask parental permission to fingerprint his child.

He was also informed that his daughter’s “consent could not be freely given” because her fingerprint scan was needed if she was to be able to get school dinner.

In May, the incoming Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition promise to “outlaw the fingerprinting of children at school without parental permission”. A government spokesman was not available yesterday to comment on the commission’s letter.

Many states across the country are taking laudable steps to enact measures that bolster administrators’ ability to protect students who face such harassment. However, despite the evidence supporting the need, right-wing lawmakers and activists insist that anti-bullying measures are nothing more than insidious tools of the “homosexual agenda”:

• The American Family Association of Michigan has spent years decrying a proposed anti-bullying measure as “a Trojan Horse to sneak [homosexual activists'] special rights agenda into law” and to “legitimize homosexual behavior” which is “a practice scientifically proven to result in a dramatically higher incidence of domestic violence, mental illness, illegal drug use, promiscuity, life-threatening disease, and premature death.” The bill “died in 2008 in the state Senate because senators could not agree” on whether to address bullying based on sexual orientation and gender identity in the measure.
• In Minnesota, Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer said he would not sign the anti-bullying Safe Schools For All bill because “I don’t want the government” instead of parents to be on “the front line of defense of our children.” Indeed, Emmer voted against and Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) vetoed the same bill in 2009 after the right-wing Minnesota Family Council pushed legislators to reject the bill in 2009 because it would “promote acceptance of homosexuality.”
• The right-wing Christian media ministry Focus on the Family is attacking an anti-bullying standard on the federal level. Insisting that bullying prevention is being “hijacked by activists” who are “politicizing or sexualizing the issue,” Focus on the Family’s Candi Cushman claims that the anti-bullying bill currently before Congress “cater[s] to a narrow political agenda” that “becomes a gateway for homosexuality promotion in school.” In their current back-to-school guide “equipping” parents with tools against the “sneaky” gay agenda, Cushman told parents to look out for bullying seminars, diversity lessons, and “cute little pictures of furry animals” as “red flags” signaling the “gay agenda.”

So does that make Republicans the equivalent of D student schoolyard bullies?  Read more here.

Loners and antisocial kids who reject other children are often bullied at school — an accepted form of punishment from peers as they establish social order. Such peer victimization may be an extreme group response to control renegades, according to a new study from Concordia University published in the Journal of Early Adolescence.

“For groups to survive, they need to keep their members under control,” says author William M. Bukowski, a professor at the Concordia Department of Psychology and director of its Centre for Research in Human Development. “Withdrawn individuals threaten the strong social fabric of a group, so kids are victimized when they are too strong or too antisocial. Victimization is a reaction to anyone who threatens group harmony.”

Bukowski notes that the word victimization is related to the word for sacrifice and speculates the term remains relevant in establishing modern dynamics among kids. “Peers who are victimized are sacrificed for the survival of the group.”

The study, which focused on 367 English-speaking kids enrolled in grades five and six at public schools in Montreal, was undertaken to gain better insight into what makes some kids popular while others are perceived as victims or bullies.

The research team focused on social versus physical aggression among kids. “Using aggression in ways that are acceptable by peers is critical in children keeping their social status and, in turn, their social dominance,” says Bukowski, noting physical attractiveness and personality traits could also influence peer standing. “We found dominant children used organized, instrumental types of relational aggression to position themselves.”

To ascertain whether kids were leaders, victims or bullies, Bukowski and his team asked participants — 176 boys and 191 girls — to rate same gender peers on 17 characteristics. Bullies, for instance, were characterized as kids “who says bad things behind other people’s backs; who purposely keep others out of their group; who tell friends they’ll stop liking them unless they do what they want.”

Alpha-kids were described as “someone who others kids usually follow; someone who is often a leader; someone who always get their own way.”

Victims, for their part, were described as “someone who gets hit or kicked by other kids; someone who gets beaten up by other kids; someone who gets ignored; someone who other kids say mean things about behind their back.”

Read more here.

We’ve been told school’s purpose is to prepare us for the workplace, right?  Apparently it’s true.  From Marge Mueller’s interview with family therapist Chauncey Hare:

Like child and spousal abuse 30 years ago, work abuse is still ignored by society.

“It’s everywhere and it’s highly denied,” Hare says. “Right now, there’s no way for a person to make the distinction between something that’s not work abuse and something that is—-until he or she goes through an enormous, highly traumatic situation.”

“In any organization that is authoritarian work abuse is prevalent. But because of denial people aren’t acknowledging it.”

Hare and co-author and wife Judith Wyatt, both licensed psychotherapists in San Francisco, coined the term work abuse in a 1988 report to the California legislature’s task force team on self-esteem. According to The University of Michigan Institute for Social Research’s statistics, 95 percent of all work organizations are authoritarian.

“That’s where work abuse happens” says Hare “In those 95% of organizations that are authoritarian.”

Four Types of Work Abuse

According to Hare, four types of work abuse exist. Neglectful or ongoing abuse occurs when employees’ basic needs are not met or they are blamed for expressing these needs. Ongoing abuse often happens in the midst of the other three types of work abuse.

In chronic scapegoating one person is chosen for abuse by the group. Everyone joins in as a way to vent negative feelings that can’t otherwise be addressed in the work system. If the scapegoat leaves the company, another employee usually assumes the scapegoat role.

With acute scapegoating one person receives the negative treatment–usually because the person’s behaviors don’t match group norms. The scapegoating stops when this employee leaves the organization.

Denial of due process, the fourth type of work abuse, occurs secondary to the other forms of abuse. With denial of due process the employer prevents or undermines appropriate means to resolve conflicts. Most work “horror stories” are cases of scapegoating resulting from unresolved conflicts.

Read more here.

Filmmaker, musician, and former psychotherapist Daniel Mackler sees an even bigger picture:

A traumatized child is safe to broken parents because he does not threaten their dishonest authority. Thus he earns his crumb of love. A traumatized student is safe to broken teachers because he does not question their unearned authority. Thus he earns his right to gain a false education.

A traumatized worker is safe to broken bosses because he follows their numbing orders. Thus he keeps his dead job and perpetuates a dead system.

A traumatized soldier is safe to a bloodthirsty military because he will mindlessly kill anyone when ordered. Thus he perpetuates grand horrors and retaliation in the world, which proves to the world hell-bent on violent revenge that his criminal presence is required.

A traumatized spouse is safe to broken partners because he never really looks them in the eye and utters those dangerous and honest truths that destroy false relationships. Thus he stays married, never has to be alone with himself, and earns society’s approval.

Mackler references traumatized soldiers.  The military’s suicides rate has been rising recently.  And that brings us back to the bullied kids I mentioned at the outset.  Read the other side of his equation here.

…In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.

The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on.

For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.

“We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded…

[continues in the New York Times]

Welcome to high school. Now drop and give me 50.

The entire freshman class at Carvers Bay High School has been automatically enrolled in the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps, a military-sponsored program that trains high school students in military discipline and concepts. Principal Richard Neal, a Navy veteran, said the school’s Marine Corps JROTC class is fulfilling the student’s physical education requirement and is part of the school’s Ninth Grade Academy.

But Charles Holloway, the parent of a freshman student at Carvers Bay, said he did not want his son in that program and when he asked that his son be taken out, his son was put in a class by himself. Holloway said he feels his son was being punished for not wanting to take part in that class…

[continues at The Sun News]

Some 1,200 elementary school children in Anyang City, south of Seoul, will receive the beepers in a test run from October.

Authorities will then consider adopting the system nationwide, the Ministry of Public Administration and Security said.

Each child will be able to use their matchbox-sized beeper, fitted with GPS (global positioning device) technology, to activate any nearby cameras and alert parents and police via mobile phone.

The government has strengthened monitoring of elementary schools after several crimes against children.

Police last month arrested a 44-year-old habitual sex offender for kidnapping an eight-year-old girl at her school in southern Seoul and raping her.

The National Police Agency has announced a plan to launch investigative units nationwide to tackle such crimes and declared “war” on child molesters.

ALL month schools in China have been on what the state-controlled press calls a “red alert” for possible attacks on pupils by intruders. In one city police have orders to shoot perpetrators on sight.

In the latest reported incident, on May 12th, seven children were hacked to death at a rural kindergarten in the northern province of Shaanxi. Eleven other children were injured. It was one of half a dozen such cases at schools across China in less than two months.

Assailants were often said to be lone, deranged, men venting their frustrations on the weak.

If there’s one thing Texans love besides barbecue, it’s paddling their kids. From the Washington Post:

“There are times when maybe a good crack might not be a bad idea,” said Robert Pippin, a custom home builder who sports a goatee and cowboy boots. His son graduated from Temple schools several years ago.

Corporal punishment remains legal in 20 states, mostly in the South, but its use is diminishing. Ohio ended it last year, and a movement for a federal ban is afoot. Most school districts across the country banned paddling of students long ago. Texas sat that trend out.

But even by Texas standards, Temple is unusual. The city, a compact railroad hub of 60,000 people, banned the practice and then revived it at the demand of parents who longed for the orderly schools of yesteryear. Since paddling was brought back to the city’s 14 schools by a unanimous board vote in May, behavior at Temple’s single high school has changed dramatically.

The summary for Chapter Two (An Angry Look At Modern Schooling) reads:

The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn and it isn’t supposed to.  It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century.  Nearly one hundred years after the investiture of forced schooling into the U.S., on April 11, 1922, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, annunced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason’s words, “the control of human behavior.”

Imagine being forced to skip your senior year of high school. Or having the option.

If you live in Utah, that could become a reality. In an effort to bridge a $700 million budget shortfall, Republican state Sen. Chris Buttars has put forth a plan to eliminate 12th grade in high school, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Facing a wealth of criticism from parents, teachers and students alike, Buttars defended a scaled down version of the idea wherein students simply had the option to exit before their final year, claiming the proposal could save the state about $60 million…

[continues at Raw Story]

The Christian “truth” about America’s founding has long been taught in Christian schools, but not beyond. Recently, however, some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history that children in public schools study. Succeeding at this would help them toward their ultimate goal of reshaping American society.

As Cynthia Dunbar, a Christian activist on the Texas board, put it, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”

Dictionaries have been removed from classrooms…after a parent complained about a child reading the definition for “oral sex.”

Merriam Webster’s 10th edition, which has been used for the past few years in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (for children aged nine to 10) in Menifee Union school district, has been pulled from shelves over fears that the “sexually graphic” entry is “just not age appropriate.”

The dictionary’s online definition of the term is “oral stimulation of the genitals”. “It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.